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June 29 - July 23, 2020
* What advice would you give your 30-year-old self? “I had so many bumps starting when I was 30 years old. They lasted for 9 years, and I wouldn’t tell my 30-year-old self anything. Because if I hadn’t had those bumps, I wouldn’t be me, and I’m glad I’m me.”
“And I roast my own beans, which is key. Marco Arment [co-founder of Tumblr, creator of Instapaper and Overcast] taught me that. Roasting your own beans is more important than any other thing you can do, if you want to make coffee. I think there’s a metaphor there. I know there’s a metaphor there. Which is, you can spend a lot of time trying to fix stuff later but starting with the right raw materials makes a huge difference.”
SETH: “There’s a place near my house called [Blue Hill at] Stone Barns Center, which used to be the Rockefellers’ summer house. It’s a nice restaurant. At the bar—I don’t drink either, but I’m told that at the bar—they serve honey oatmeal vodka. I reverse engineered the recipe, and it’s not a still, but I make it in my basement. The recipe, for those who are interested, is you take a bottle of vodka—you don’t want the supercheap stuff but you don’t want the expensive stuff because that’s a little bit of a rip-off—you pour it over a pound of just plain old oatmeal, uncooked, and half a jar of
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“We all have, let’s say, two or three dozen massive pain points in our lives that everyone can relate to. I try to basically write about those, and then I try to write about how I attempted to recover from them.”
James recommends the habit of writing down 10 ideas each morning in a waiter’s pad or tiny notebook. This exercise is for developing your “idea muscle” and confidence for creativity on demand, so regular practice is more important than the topics: “What if [you] just can’t come up with 10 ideas? Here’s the magic trick: If you can’t come up with 10 ideas, come up with 20 ideas. . . . You are putting too much pressure on yourself. Perfectionism is the ENEMY of the idea muscle . . . it’s your brain trying to protect you from harm, from coming up with an idea that is embarrassing and stupid and
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10 old ideas I can make new 10 ridiculous things I would invent (e.g., the smart toilet) 10 books I can write (The Choose Yourself Guide to an Alternative Education, etc). 10 business ideas for Google/Amazon/Twitter/etc. 10 people I can send ideas to 10 podcast ideas or videos I can shoot (e.g., Lunch with James, a video podcast where I just have lunch with people over Skype and we chat) 10 industries where I can remove the middleman 10 things I disagree with that everyone else assumes is religion (college, home ownership, voting, doctors, etc.) 10 ways to take old posts of mine and make books
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10 things I was interested in as a kid that might be fun to explore now (Like, maybe I can write that “Son of Dr. Strange” comic I’ve always been planning. And now I need 10 plot ideas.) 10 ways I might try to solve a problem I have This has saved me with the IRS countless times. Unfortunately, the Department of Motor Vehicles is impervious to my superpowers.
On the Value of Selective Ignorance, After Working at a Newspaper “You’re basically told, ‘Find the thing that’s going to scare people the most and write about it.’ . . . It’s like every day is Halloween at the newspaper. I avoid newspapers.” TF: Many productive people do the same, including Nassim Taleb.
The World Doesn’t Need Your Explanation. On Saying “No”: “I don’t give explanations anymore, and I’ll catch myself when I start giving explanations like ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I can’t make it. I have a doctor’s appointment that day. I’m really sick. I broke my leg over the weekend’ or something. I just say, ‘I can’t do it. I hope everything is well.’”
“Forget purpose. It’s okay to be happy without one. The quest for a single purpose has ruined many lives.”
“Losers have goals. Winners have systems.”
Scott helped me refocus, to use his language, on “systems” instead of “goals.” This involves choosing projects and habits that, even if they result in “failures” in the eyes of the outside world, give you transferable skills or relationships. In other words, you choose options that allow you to inevitably “succeed” over time, as you build assets that carry over to subsequent projects.
“What persistent skills or relationships can I develop?” versus “What short-term goal can I achieve?”
“All you do is you pick a goal and you write it down 15 times a day in some specific sentence form, like ‘I, Scott Adams, will become an astronaut,’ for example. And you do that every day.
‘reticular activation’? It’s basically the idea that it’s easy to hear your own name spoken in a crowd.
Basically, your brain isn’t capable of processing everything in its environment, or even coming close. So the best it can do is set up these little filters.
And the way it sets its filters is by what you pay attention to. It’s what you spend the most energy on. . . . That’s how you set your filter. So your filter is automatically set for your name, because that’s the thing that matters most to you. “But you can use these affirmations, presumably—this is just a hypothesis—to focus your mind and your memory on a very specific thing. And that would allow you to notice things in your environment that might have already been there. It’s just that your filter was set to ignore, and then you just tune it through this memory and repetition trick until it
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“‘Check your facts’ is what I call the ‘high ground maneuver.’ It’s the same thing Jobs did when he explained away Antennagate just by saying, ‘All smart phones have problems. We’re trying to make our customers happy.’ He made a national story go away in less than 30 seconds with those two sentences.”
I’m thinking of these ideas and they’re flowing through my head, I’m monitoring my body; I’m not monitoring my mind. And when my body changes, I have something that other people are going to care about, too.”
if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths: 1) Become the best at one specific thing. 2) Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things.
Capitalism rewards things that are both rare and valuable. You make yourself rare by combining two or more “pretty goods” until no one else has your mix. . . . At least one of the skills in your mixture should involve communication, either written or verbal.
“In the world of ideas, to name something is to own it. If you can name an issue, you can own the issue.” —Thomas L. Friedman
If you can’t be first in a category, set up a new category you can be first in.
When you launch a new product, the first question to ask yourself is not “How is this new product better than the competition?” but “First what?” In other words, what category is this new product first in?
This is counter to classic marketing thinking, which is brand oriented: How do I get people to prefer my brand? Forget the brand. Think categories. Prospects are on the defensive when it comes to brands. Everyone talks about why their brand is better. But prospects have an open mind when it comes to categories. Everyone is interested in what’s new. Few people are interested in what’s better.
The New Rich (NR) are those who abandon the deferred-life plan [save and retire after 20–40 years] and create luxury lifestyles in the present using the currency of the New Rich: time and mobility. This is an art and a science we will refer to as Lifestyle Design (LD). . . . $1,000,000 in the bank isn’t the fantasy. The fantasy is the lifestyle of complete freedom it supposedly allows. The question is then, How can one achieve the millionaire lifestyle of complete freedom without first having $1,000,000?
“I don’t create art to get high-dollar projects, I do high-dollar projects so I can create more art.”
“Creativity is an infinite resource. The more you spend,the more you have.”
I wanted to do less work, and do high-end stuff. Now, I don’t want to pretend I didn’t do a shitload. This is like a 10-year, overnight success program . . . I was eating, breathing, sleeping photography, [and then] when I was able to start to monetize my craft, I did so at a very high price point. Little note: If someone ever says ‘yes’ that quickly, you didn’t ask for enough.”
Why? Novice podcasters (which I was), bloggers, and artists of all types get too distracted in nascent stages with monetization. For podcasting: In the first 3 to 9 months, you should be honing your craft and putting out increasingly better work. “Good content is the best SEO,” as Robert Scoble originally told me.
Option A: You can waste 30 to 50% of your time persuading a few small sponsors to commit early, then stall at 30K downloads per episode because you’re neglecting the creative. Things are even worse if you get mired in the world of sketchy affiliate deals. Option B: You can play the long game, wait 6 to 12 months until you have a critical mass, then get to 300K downloads per episode and make more than 10 times per episode with much larger brands who can afford to scale with you as you grow. Haste makes waste. In this case, it can easily make the difference between $50K per year and more than $1
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Amplify your strengths rather than fix your weaknesses.
“I took a lot of cues from Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat [he took graffiti off the street and brought it into the gallery], and Robert Rauschenberg [large-scale guy, crazy mixed media], the artists in New York in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s because they were hackers. . . . [Some of them] were making art about making art. They were reinventing the game while they were playing it. “If I look across and everyone else is doing X, how do you zig when everyone else is zagging? The way that I zigged when everyone else was zagging in photography was I chronicled my exploits of learning my
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“I was told my whole career: You have to specialize, specialize. I ‘specialized’ in pursuing the things that interested me.
I historically would have been called a dilettante, but to be able to touch all of these things [is to] find out that they ultimately inform one another.”
don’t be afraid to do something you’re not qualified to do.”
“If I had always done what I was ‘qualified’ to do, I’d be pushing a broom somewhere.”
“Amateurs built the Ark, professionals built the Titanic.”
said, ‘It’s history, and I’m not qualified to talk about history. I don’t have a doctorate, I’m not a historian.’ And she said, ‘I didn’t realize you had to have a doctorate to tell stories.’
“That’s my style. ‘I meant to do that. As a matter of fact, if you do it, you’re imitating me.’ So it’s partly taking what you already do and saying, ‘No, no, this isn’t a negative. This is the thing I bring to the table, buddy. I copyrighted that. I talk real loud, and then I talk really quietly, and if you have a problem with that, you don’t understand what good style is.’ Just copyright your faults, man.”
‘Don’t stress about it, it’s all going to work out in the end.’
Although, if you had told me that, I might have relaxed so much that [my current] reality might never have occurred. So that’s why you can’t go back in the time machine and step on the butterfly—you’ll screw up everything.
If you understand principles, you can create tactics. If you are dependent on perishable tactics, you are always at a disadvantage.
“Indian people do not get punched in the face, dude. They do not get in fights. We are doing spelling bees.”
your material is good, if it is engaging, there is almost no maximum you can write. . . . My point is not ‘write longer.’ It is ‘do not worry about space.’
“Second, I cannot recommend guest posting enough. I did one for you [‘The Psychology of Automation’]—that probably took me 20 to 25 hours to write. It was very detailed. It included video, all kinds of stuff, and to this day a lot of the people I meet, I ask, ‘How did you hear about me?’ and they say, ‘Oh, through Tim Ferriss.’”
“Free” means that 99% of what I do is free to the world (e.g., podcast, blog) or nearly free (books). I write on topics that A) I enjoy and want to learn more about, and that B) I think will attract intelligent, driven, and accomplished people. This is what allows ultra-premium.
Ultra-premium means: Once in a blue moon, I offer a high-priced and very limited product or opportunity, such as an event with 200 seats at $7.5K to $10K per seat. I can sell out a scarce, ultra-premium opportunity within 48 hours with a single blog post, as I did with my “Opening the Kimono” (OTK) event in Napa. Of course, then you have to overdeliver. My measurement of customer satisfaction? The Facebook group established for attendees is still active . . . 5 years later.
An openness to indirect paths means I don’t obsess over selling my “content,” and I never have. My network, partially built through writing, is my net worth. If you want to increase your income 10x instead of 10%, the best opportunities are often seemingly out of left field (e.g., books → startups).
“Success” need not be complicated. Just start with making 1,000 people extremely, extremely happy.
